I’ve been considering building my own NAS using the NAS Killer 4.0/4.1 guide. However, I’m curious whether it might be better to test the waters with my previous gaming PC (which is currently unused, but perfectly functional). According to my Kill-a-watt meter, it draws about 90 watts at idle with one SATA SSD and one HDD. How much power will a NAS Killer build draw? Trying to determine what the payback on replacement hardware might be.
1 Like
What hardware do you have now?
Most of the power draw in a NAS is from spinning hard drives, usually…
1 Like
Current hardware is, well, old:
AMD Phenom II 955BE (ALL THE NANOMETERS)
960 Motherboard chipset (AM3+)
2x4GB DDR3 RAM
AMD Radeon R9 280 GPU
80+ certified PSU (not bronze/silver/etc. rated)
1x WD SATA 1TB HDD
1x Crucial SATA 500GB SSD
CoolerMaster Hyper 212+ CPU Cooler
2 case fans
Like I said, old, and inefficient. I honestly expected more than 90 watts at idle, and I know that any Intel-based build will use less power and offer more theoretical performance, but I’m curious what the ROI on a MOBO/CPU swap would be. Even if I assume 120 watts average load (which would probably be high) I’m only looking at about $125 of electricity a year.
My setup draws about 120 to 140 watts according to what the battery backup is reporting to UNRAID.
Supermicro X9SCL, 16gb ram, Nvidia GPU, XEON 1240 v2, 4 SAS drives, 1 SATA HDD, 1 SATA SSD for cache, 1 raid card, 1 hdmi dummy plug, 4 Artic 120mm pwm fans…cpu temp @59c
I think when I started it was around 100-110 watts but I’ve added more SAS drives swapping out from SATA. The SAS drives pull more juice or at least the ones I got do. So yeah you will notice it on the electric bill once you go down the rabbit hole.
I’ve got a similar old AMD (actually two) that I can’t bring myself to get rid of but it’s about time. Beyond just tinkering with building a NAS I can’t say that machine you have will be overly practical long term.
1 Like
That’s kinda what I figured. Now to convince SWMBO that we need a home server so we can self-host stuff.
I’m running UNRAID with a X9SCL, XEON E3-1270 v2, 16GB ram, 3 spinny disks, 2 SSD, Nvidia GPU. I also have plugged in a Netgear Prosafe GS108E switch and an HP 290 running Plex. My load is sitting right at 99 watts.
1 Like
- I am assuming the spinning disks consume the most power when active/seeking - but how much - like 5W each?
- How much would their idle draw be?
- How much would a SSD when idle draw?
Hooray! I can update my own thread! My NK4.1 build with one SSD and one SATA HDD is idling at 63 watts.
Tyan S5512 MoBo
Xeon E3-1230v2 CPU
16GB RAM
Not bad considering the CPU you have.